Amatriciana, with spicy capicollo, mushrooms and onions

Photograph by: Shaughn Butts
, Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON - Sincerity, hard work and perfectly al dente pasta will take you far in the restaurant business.

Vincenzo “Enzo” Tagliente seems to have taken this formula to heart in his new neighbourhood bistro, Enzo’s on 76, predictably located on 76th Avenue in the former Tra Amici café, in a forgotten little commercial strip at 112th Street in McKernan.

While his simple, delicious food had us hooked from the outset, it was his personal visit from the kitchen at the end of the meal that cemented our love affair.

“How was everything?” he asked. “Please, give me honest feedback — I want to know,” he insisted as he shook my hand, unaware I was reviewing his three-week-old eatery.

Try as we might to come up with something constructively critical, all we could offer was praise for the food, the service and the surroundings.

The appreciative Enzo then urged my friend and me to come in any time for a glass of wine. “The door’s always open, until 2 a.m.,” he said. “If there are people in here, I’m here.” Sure enough, the website lists the bistro’s hours as 11 a.m. until “close,” seven days a week.

Tagliente has worked in local restaurants for years, but Enzo’s is his first ownership venture, with the help of a business partner. He’s been there every day since it opened, which was 20-plus days and counting on the night we visited.

The previous Friday, he had a full house. Saturday, there was a lineup out the door, he says.

If our experience was typical, it’s no wonder. The mid-sized room, about 10 or 12 tables, is woody, unpretentious and warm, decorated with poster-sized photos taken by Tagliente on a recent trip to Italy. The menu is uncluttered, focusing on Italian classics, well-prepared with simple, fresh ingredients.

There is no reinventing the wheel-shaped noodle here. Enzo isn’t making his own sausage, straining his own ricotta or infusing his own oils in his few off-hours. His food is familiar and delicious, the kind you might eat at home yourself, if only you lived in Italy and had a nonna who really loved you.

The pasta is al dente. The sauce is pure tomato and garlic and basil. The mussels are plump; the meatballs are plumper.

The menu is concise, offering a comfortable range of choices without overreaching into fussiness: a handful of salads and appetizers, a couple of soups, including a daily version, shrimp with a choice of interesting sauces like red curry cream and Jack Daniels peppercorn, and some pasta variations with long or short noodles ($15 each).

Mains stick to just a couple of true classics: chicken parmigiana and linguine pescatore.

For lunch, Enzo’s offers five different panini sandwiches.

We began with a straightforward salad of bocconcini, tomato and basil, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic ($9).

Next came pasta, of course; a food so wonderfully comforting when cooked right and so uninspired when cooked wrong.

Enzo’s version of Amatriciana was definitely in the comforting category — spicy capicollo, mushrooms and onion in tomato sauce, toothsome and flavourful on al dente penne.

We couldn’t pass up the pescatore ($26), and we were glad we didn’t. A good-sized serving of linguine in a delicate white wine sauce was tossed with plenty of mussels, shrimp, scallops and clams along with several crab legs.

And because Enzo lets you order “add-ons” like meatballs and rapini and sausage to whatever you please, we did, choosing a couple of meatballs ($2 each), just for kicks. They too were as we’d hoped, just right in flavour, moistness and size in that Goldilocks, middle-ground way.

The house red was decent, and decently priced, at $14 a half-litre.

Our inability to finish what we ordered — a commentary more on our enthusiasm in ordering that on the quality of the food — didn’t deter us from moving on to dessert.

The choices again are few but wise. We tried a yummy, creamy tiramisu ($7) made from Enzo’s mama’s recipe, and my longtime favourite, affogato, a dessert that combines the best of Italian post-meal indulgences — gelato and espresso.

A blob of vanilla ice cream with an espresso shot poured on top doesn’t sound all that impressive, until you try it. Smooth, sweet, cold and warm, with the perfect mix of vanilla and coffee flavours, it’s the kind of crossover food-beverage that could (and should) finish every meal.

Enzo’s is exactly what a neighbourhood bistro should be: warm and inviting with uncomplicated, delicious, affordable food. Those who live close enough to walk off a daily affogato should count themselves lucky.

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